Read news fast with Google Fast Flip — One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles …

Visual Search - Why type when you can see it? — How many times have you seen a movie trailer and forgotten the name of it the next day? You go online to search for it but you can't seem to find the movie with “what's-his-name” in it anywhere but you can picture the actor in your head.

Microsoft launches Bing ‘Visual Search’ — You see that headline? “Visual Search” is in quotation marks because Monday's announcement at the TechCrunch 50 conference about Bing's new search feature is a bit of a canard. — What Microsoft is launching is very cool, mind you.

Accounting rule change in Apple's favor — A change in accounting rules for which Apple (AAPL) — among other high-tech companies — lobbied heavily won tentative approval last Thursday. The change could significantly affect both the company's reported earnings and its stock price.

Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data! — Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing.

First real pictures of HTC Leo - All rumours confirmed — PDA.Pl has been lucky enough to have the very first real pictures of HTC Leo (Via PDAClub.pl forums), and the device is a stonker! Present is the massive screen, the gigahertz processor, the amazing thinness, the dual flash and even the words at the back.

TC50: Clicker Wants To Be TV Guide For The Web — More and more television content is making its way online. But because of different deals by various networks, it's all over the place. Even the huge sites like Hulu, only skim the surface in showing what is out there.

Gaming veteran Shane Kim to leave Microsoft — Shane Kim — who, last year became the Corporate Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) — is leaving the company, according to a September 15 post on Gamespot.

Galleries: Unleash your inner curator — There's a long list of features that we've wanted to develop for our members. Giving our members a way to celebrate the creativity of their fellow members has always been high on that list. Today, we're thrilled to launch our newest feature: galleries.

Microsoft to businesses: Enough with the Windows XP already — Microsoft has been haunted for years by the ghost of Windows XP — the 8-year-old operating system that many big businesses still view as good enough for their purposes and far less painful than upgrading to its successor, Windows Vista.

TC50: Spawn Labs Is Slingbox For Video Games — Slingbox owners love their devices. They allow you to watch your home television content anywhere you are in the world with an Internet connection. A new startup, Spawn Labs, launching today at TechCrunch50 wants to extend that concept to video games.

Facebook support for Twitter-like mentions now live — Facebook is now supporting @ symbol for tagging friends in posts and status updates. The company said last week it would move toward adopting the convention, which started on Twitter. — The symbol has been part of Twitter etiquette for a long time.

Facebook fights Virginia's demand for user data, photos — The state of Virginia has backed away from its attempts to force Facebook to divulge the complete contents of a user's account to settle a dispute over workers' compensation, narrowly avoiding what promised to be a high-profile privacy battle in federal court.

404: Intel General Counsel Not Found — Pat Gelsinger isn't the only Intel veteran departing the company amid the big management restructuring announced today. Longtime general counsel Bruce Sewell is taking his leave as well. — Which is interesting since Sewell has been quarterbacking Intel's …

Palm Pixi Processor: Full Spec Sheet — The new Palm Pixi differs from its big brother, the Palm Pre, in a few important ways. One of those is the hardware that runs the whole shebang: the Qualcomm MSM7627 chipset. On Tuesday, we linked to Qualcomm's February press release announcing the MSM7227 …

VCs Increasingly Keeping Young Start-Ups To Themselves — At a time of modest exit expectations, venture investors are increasingly likely to avoid syndicating first rounds, according to new data from VentureSource. … In the first half of this year, 63.2% of first rounds had only one venture investor.

TC50: Udorse lets you tag your photos with product endorsements — Turn your Facebook album into a Wheaties box or Armani ad. — That's the premise behind Udorse, a new company that debuted at the TechCrunch50 trade show in San Francisco. Udorse lets you tag personal photos with product endorsements or “Udorsements.”

US Twitter Usage Surpasses Earlier Estimates — Numbers worth tweeting about — In 2009, there will be 18 million US adults who access Twitter on any platform at least monthly. That represents a 200% increase over 2008 levels. Usage will reach 26 million US adults in 2010, a further 44.4% climb.